Forget the Monster Mash. For the ultimate Halloween playlist, reach for horror soundtracks, 1940s kids’ music and Russian darkwave – all chosen by Sunn O))), Creeper, Diamanda Galás and more

Bernard Herrmann – The Murder (1960)
Scary music actually excites me, but the piece that most sends shivers down my spine is the music in the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho. I’ve seen it numerous times and even though I know what’s coming, the stabbing knife synched with Bernard Herrmann’s score always freaks me out.

The singer’s lyrics about an open marriage gone sour resonate with many women her age. They’re sick of pretending to be fine with relationships that are not

Lily Allen was always an enviably cool girl.

When she first burst on to the music scene nearly two decades ago at 21, it was with a breezy, don’t-care London swagger. Her songs concealed big, painful feelings under flippant, deadpan lyrics and deceptively sweet melodies, which made them easier to swallow. Even this summer, when she talked on her thrillingly unfiltered podcast Miss Me? about having lost count of exactly how many abortions she’d had, she sang the words to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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As some families face a 200-year wait for an affordable home, what exactly has gone wrong?

The stats are stark: families on Bath and North East Somerset council’s social housing list face a 200-year wait for a four-bedroom property and the latest available figures show England is building just a little over 10,000 social homes a year.

Tackling this crisis was a key element of Labour’s election promise to build 1.5m homes over five years, with the government in July announcing plans to spend £39bn building 300,000 affordable homes over a decade, 60% of them for social rent.

The man was unconscious but there was no time to wake him, the smoke and flames were closing in

On Halloween night in 2020, I came home from work in a terrible mood. I’d had a bad day, and was thinking, “F-everybody.” My wife’s sister was hosting a party that night and I had two costume options – Jesus, or Homelander, the psychopathic superhero from Amazon Prime series The Boys. Because of my state of mind, I went with Homelander. I’d already bought the costume, complete with its stars and stripes cape.

We live in Greenville, Ohio and the party was a short drive across town. My wife, Chelsey, was behind the wheel, dressed as Starlight, another superhero from The Boys, and my kids were in the back of the car in their Iron Man and dragon outfits. Chelsey took a turn down a road as we neared her sister’s house and that’s when I saw flames shooting out of another house.

(Polydor)
On her self-deprecating, viscera-flecked sixth record, Florence Welch picks apart the compulsions and contradictions of fame

The title track of Everybody Scream provides a suitably striking opening for Florence + the Machine’s sixth album. A sinister organ and a choir of voices harmonise in the style of a horror theme, replaced in short order by the sound of screaming and a stomping glam rock rhythm; instead of the shouts of “Hey!” that traditionally punctuated a glitterbeat in the 70s, there are distaff cries of “Dance!” and “Turn!” Its sound offers a corrective to the notion that whenever the National’s Aaron Dessner appears as co-producer in an album’s credits, as he does here, it means the artist in question is striving for tastefully hued indie folk – the sound he brought to Taylor Swift’s 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore, Ed Sheeran’s Autumn Variations and the mistier moments of Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us. It also provides a backdrop over which Florence Welch can ruminate on what sounds like a very complicated relationship with fame. She says she can only become her “full size” on stage and openly relishes the control she can exert over an audience, “breathless and begging and screaming”. Equally, there appears to be a downside. “Look at me run myself ragged, blood on the stage,” she sings. “But how can I leave when you’re calling my name?”

Amid the stuff about paganism, witchcraft and the references to 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, this appears to be the central theme of Everybody Scream: the push and pull of fame, a compulsive desire to perform that overwhelms everything in ways that seem unhealthy. It crops up again and again, sometimes in visceral terms linked to the grim events of 2023, when complications from a miscarried ectopic pregnancy left Welch needing emergency life-saving surgery mid-tour – “I crawled up from under the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt, spitting out my songs so you could sing along,” opens One of the Greats, over grumbling, Velvet Underground-ish guitar courtesy of Idles’ Mark Bowen – and sometimes with a winning kind of self-deprecating humour. Music by Men details a relationship in crisis, scorns Welch’s partner, then shifts the blame on to herself. The problem with life offstage, she notes ruefully, is that “there’s not much applause”.

How will Jamaica recover from its most powerful hurricane on record? Natricia Duncan reports

When Hurricane Melissa reached Jamaica on Tuesday, it was the most powerful weather system to hit the island since records began.

Ava Brown, in St Catherine parish, says her neighbourhood has been turned upside down. “Most of my neighbours’ roofs are gone. Crops and animals have drowned. Roads are impassable. People have died. I heard an unconfirmed report that one of the hospitals is almost unusable. It’s a disaster.”

King’s brother will become known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Buckingham Palace says, in latest fallout from Epstein scandal

• Not in this together: King Charles cuts Andrew loose to save royal family’s repute

• The fall of Prince Andrew – a timeline

Prince Andrew is to be stripped of his royal titles and will move out of his home at the Royal Lodge in Windsor, Buckingham Palace has announced.

King Charles has initiated a “formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the palace said.

Agency says staff member offered to apply for licence to allow chancellor to rent out family home, but failed to do so

Keir Starmer appears to have escaped the huge political damage of potentially losing his chancellor weeks before the budget, after 24 hours of intense scrutiny over whether Rachel Reeves broke the law when she rented out her family home.

The Conservatives said Reeves must be sacked if she committed an offence by not obtaining a council licence before letting out her four-bedroom house in south London when the family moved into 11 Downing Street. No 10 was initially unable to explain why Starmer believed an apology from the chancellor was sufficient.

Akeela Ahmed, of British Muslim Trust, says experience is part of a wider rise in anti-Muslim hatred

The chief executive of the government’s new official partner in tackling Islamophobia has spoken about being refused service in a shop for being Muslim, amid concerns about a rise in insidious anti-Muslim “microaggressions”.

The British Muslim Trust (BMT) is launching a government-backed telephone and online reporting service for hate crimes. In July, the trust was selected as a recipient of the government’s “combating hate against Muslims fund”, and in the months since its chief executive, Akeela Ahmed, has been meeting members of Muslim communities, including in Bradford in West Yorkshire, East Sussex, Greater London and Greater Manchester.

Family denied entry at gate after one of their children had epileptic seizure – but HMRC said she took a one-way flight

A woman has had her child benefit stopped after booking a holiday to Italy because HMRC inferred she had emigrated – even though she and her family did not board the flight.

Sally, her three children and her partner were going on holiday to Italy last July, but were refused boarding after one of the children had an epileptic seizure at the departure gate.